Standards and methodologies for evaluating digital forensics tools : Developing and testing a new methodology

Standards play a big role in a lot of professions and when it comes to most aspects of law enforcement and forensic investigation, it’s no different. Despite that, for some reason, there aren’t any for when it comes to evaluating and choosing forensic tools. The lack of an international standard for evaluating forensic tools has a clear negative impact on the digital forensics community as it lowers the value of tool tests and evaluations and hinders both the reproducibility and verification of their results. Most tool evaluations are performed with custom forensic images and measures metrics that are not scientifically motivated, but rather made up based on the evaluator's personal preferences. By examining current standards and related work done in the field, a new methodology is proposed. It builds on scientific principles and the strengths of existing literature. The methodology is then tested in a practical experiment. The result of the paper is a solid foundation for a new standard to be built upon